Quotes by Simon McBurney

About Simon McBurney:

Simon Montagu McBurney is an English actor, writer and director. He is the founder and artistic director of the Théâtre de Complicité, London.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic.

Simon McBurney

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

Simon McBurney

I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?

Simon McBurney

I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there.

Simon McBurney

For me, acting is like a holiday. When you're directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It's exciting but exhausting, especially when you're like me: always wanting to break the rules.

Simon McBurney

I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.'

Simon McBurney

I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.

Simon McBurney

I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.

Simon McBurney

In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making ...

Simon McBurney

In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.

Simon McBurney

I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.

Simon McBurney

I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth.

Simon McBurney

In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more abou...

Simon McBurney

Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?'

Simon McBurney

The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.

Simon McBurney

The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they're doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell.

Simon McBurney

I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.

Simon McBurney

When I was doing 'A Disappearing Number' in Plymouth, we had to go on an hour and a half late, and I still hadn't written an end, so we had to make one up, and then we had to go out literally with our pants round our ankles.

Simon McBurney

When I met Miller, for me it wasn't a question of wanting to meet him because it was Arthur Miller; it was a kind of astonishment that I could meet someone who was so deeply embedded in the psyche of my artistic development.

Simon McBurney

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold...

Simon McBurney

There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.

Simon McBurney

Author Bio

  • NameSimon McBurney
  • DescriptionBritish actor, voice actor and director
  • AliasesSimon Montagu McBurney
  • BornAugust 25, 1957
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionActor
  • AwardsLaurence Olivier Award; Officer Of The Order Of The British Empire; Konrad Wolf Prize